


How to Kill a God

by hundreddollarlarry



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellamy is Hades, Clarke is Persephone, F/M, Persephone/Hades retelling, minor clexa - Freeform, this fic is a Lot tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-07 04:50:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19202239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundreddollarlarry/pseuds/hundreddollarlarry
Summary: Clarke grows up with something few gods get, Love.But when that’s taken from her, she’s left with one question: how do you kill a god?Her search to answer that question leads her to the underworld, and it’s cursed god, Bellamy.Will she ever answer her question, or will she be side lined and trapped?





	1. Part I: Summer

The ground itself shifted when she was born, quiet and watchful, into the long summer.  
Her mother, goddess of harvest and healing, screamed as Clarke tumbled into the world, feet planted firmly as she landed.  
Her father, god of invention and engineering, had liked to say that she spent the first five minutes of her life watching as the wood nymphs that served as midwifes draped her in a blanket. Her mother pounded a hundred questions at the wood nymphs, but they stood in awe of Clarke, with her long golden curls, toddler sized body, and adult eyes.  
She spoke a couple minutes later.  
“I’m fine mother, thank you,” she answered in full sentence.  
It was an unusual birth, even for a god.  
She was unusual, even for a god.  
And she was watched, closely for it. 

Jaha, her uncle and the king of the gods came to pay his respects to her and her parents the next day, his children and the rest of his court in tow.  
She smiled in greeting at all of them, and watched with careful eyes.  
They smiled back in greeting and she is watched in return with careful eyes.  
Jaha pulled her father aside, their heads bowed together as quiet words left their mouths.  
Her father pulled away to find her watching, and gave her a look that even to her looked full of a thousand years of sorrow.  
Afterwards her father pulled her aside and told her to be careful with her uncle and cousins. Told her that Jaha overthrew his own father to be the king. Told her that he is suspicious of any family members that might have the same ambitions.  
She nodded in understanding and avoided that part of her family as much as possible. 

But most of her early days were spent with her mother in long golden fields, her hand twisting in stalks of tall grains.  
Every night she drank honey rich ambrosia and ate feasts kings would be jealous of.  
Her dad answered all of her questions and let her into his forges, her mother taught her to mend small animals and deer and eventually, mortals who knew how to ask.  
She had a lot more then most gods have: love. 

She went out one morning, a basket of seeds in the crook of her elbow, a day like many others. She was only 60 years, an infant goddess. She walked with her mother, scattering and blessing them as each one falls through her finger tips.  
They walk miles and miles until the seeds were gone.  
“Father?” Clarke called as she entered their home. She set the basket on the table, and walked outside across the yard to her father’s forge.  
“Father?” She called out again, peeking in to see the fire turned into white embers. She stepped out to see her mother frozen in the doorway of their little cottage.  
“Father?” Clarke asked her mother. Her mother shook her head, gaze still fastened ahead, at her father’s seat at the head of their table. It was empty.  
Silence fell like white grey ash.  
“Mother?” Clarke choked out.  
“It’s only been sixty years,”  
“Mother?” Clarke repeated.  
“We were supposed to have more time,” Abby states, eyes forward. “Jaha!”  
Stood still as a tree in a storm, Clarke watched her mother turn and scream once more into the sky “Jaha,”  
“Mother?” Clarke asked once more.  
“Go inside, stay there, and don’t come out,” Abby ordered.  
“Where’s father?”  
“Go, Clarke, now,”  
Clarke went, staying in the main room and peeking through the window. Her mother stood, face tilted up, body still in a way that only the immortal can manage.  
An hour, a day, a century later, Jaha appeared, stepping out of nothingness.  
Her mother talked, and Clarke’s ears strained to listen. She failed, and only her mother’s angry expression reached her.  
Jaha shrugged, face as uncaring as only a god can be.  
He did not stay long, gave Abby a shake of his head before he left. There one second, gone the next.  
Her mother stayed in the yard for a long time.  
Clarke fell asleep watching her through the window.  
Her mother shook her awake with unexpected violence. Abby crouched down so she was eye level with Clarke where she’d slumped on the ground.  
“Mother? Where’s father?”  
“He’s gone,” she answered, face pulled into the extreme apathy of gods. Clarke had never seen that look on her mother.  
“How can he be gone?”  
“You are to never ask me that again. Your father is dead. Jaha killed him. That is all you need to know,”  
“Gods can’t die,” Clarke had stated with a warm certainty.  
Abby slapped her.  
Clarke raised a hand to her hot cheek.  
Abby’s hand fell to her lap where she tucked it in between her thighs.  
“You never speak of him again,” Abby told her, voice hard and face flat. “Do you understand me?”  
Clarke opened her mouth only to shut it.  
Then she nodded.  
Her mother gave her a long dead eyed look before standing up and walking away.  
Clarke stayed on the floor for a long, long time.  
How could a god vanish?  
How could a god die?  
How do you kill a god?  
Three days later when she finally stood up, she still did not know. 

Years passed and her mother changed. Everyday growing more strict and callous, everyday yanking Clarke closer to her side, until Clarke spent her days choking on her mothers smell, her hair, her skin.  
Clarke didn’t dare pull away.  
She kept her fathers name out of her mouth, and her eyes on the ground as harvest after harvest came.  
She tried to keep him out of her thoughts too. Tried, and mostly failed.  
She morned him. Missed his smile and smell and games and voice and arms and love.  
It’s another thing she choked on.  
Years and years and years passed and Clarke spent them choking. 

She was almost 700 years old when she met her. A queen amongst the mortals. Her skin was warm to the touch and her smile came as a slow curving of her lips, if at all.  
Clarke didn’t know mortals could be that beautiful.  
Her name was Lexa and she made Clarke feel like she could breathe for the first time in well over half a millennium.  
Lexa came to her mother for healing, half dead but still fighting, as her men carried her into the forest where her mother and her sometimes saw the sick and injured.  
Abby wasn’t there, she was planting in the fields. But Clarke was.  
She lept for her herbs and tonics before they had set her down.  
It was a long night, an arrow was stuck in her lung and she had three more in her side. No mortal healer could’ve saved her, Clarke barely managed.  
But she pulled through.  
Her mother came and checked on the queen the next morning, she nodded at Clarke’s good work.  
Clarke was all at once satisfied and exhausted. 

In the weeks that followed, Clarke grew close to the healing queen.  
Lexa could be distant and haughty. But she was a good leader, who loved her people. And Clarke’s respect for her grew.  
And Lexa, for all her grumbling of going back to her people, had lingered as her time to leave came closer.  
The first touch of Lexa’s lips to hers came as a shock.  
The second touch found Clarke in Lexa’s bed.  
By the third Clarke loved the mortal queen.  
Hands brushed everywhere, eyes roamed to private places, mouths pressed into areas that made them gasp.  
Afterwards they slept, pressed close together on Alexa’s small cot.  
“She will die,” is the first thing Abby said to her when Clarke made her way home three nights later.  
“I just saved her,” Clarke reminded.  
“She may survive these wounds, but she can’t survive her mortality,” Abby said, her face as hard as it had been for 600 years.  
“Then I better make our time count,” Clarke said before turning back. 

She went back with Lexa, living with the mortals for thirty years, watching Lexa build an empire.  
The city prayed to her, and she blessed it whenever she could.  
For thirty whole years she could breath. She unwrapped herself from the black shroud of grief swaddling her.  
She spent the days in Lexa’s war rooms, offering advice or in her medbay, healing her men. She spent her nights in Lexa’s bed, worshipping at the alter of the mortal warrior queen.  
But at the end Lexa started to frown at Clarke’s eternally youthful face, and she started to pull down at the lines starting to form at the corners of her own lips and cheeks.  
She stopped letting Clarke touch her, spending more nights asleep in her chair in her war room.  
Even so, Clarke was still surprised when Lexa told her to leave, after over three decades together.  
She tried to reason with her, but Lexa had made up her mind.  
Clarke finally gave up, walking away leaving the palace she helped Lexa build. Away from Lexia, the city Lexa named after herself. 

For five years, she toured around the outskirts of Lexa’s empire. She visited farms and small villages, healed animals and mortals, and taught lessons in irrigation.  
The people were glad to have her, they bowed low to the ground and tried to give her guest rites that would make Jaha jealous. She turned away as much as possible, she refused to be the reason the people suffered.  
Indra found her in one of those villages, and Clarke knew the old woman, now grey and slow. She carried no good news. The family Clarke was staying with scattered as the old woman approached.  
“She’s gone?” Clarke asked, knowing the answer.  
“She died in battle earlier this week,” Indra confirmed.  
“She was too old to be fighting,”  
“The healers said she was dying anyway. She wanted a warriors death. She wanted to earn her glory,”  
“She did,” Clarke said, nodding. She thinks of Lexa’s too green eyes squinting at her opponent. How she had become the opponent by the time she was almost gone. “She did,” 

She went back home, more broken than she left.  
“Never again,” her mother said after one glance at Clarke’s huddled body and dead eyes. “You are to never leave my side ever again,”  
Clarke was too tired to argue. 

She sowed in the fields again, healed the injured and sick for most of her days.  
Her mother was within her sight, always.  
They moved around each other like long suffering apparitions, too familiar with each other’s presence, tied together and too far gone to think of leaving.  
Clarke supposed that’s exactly what they were. 

Four hundred years later Clarke checked on a wounded deer in the woods. She turned around only to find herself face to face with three men. Three gods.  
“What do you want?” Her mother asked, walking with no footprints until she’s behind Clarke.  
One of them scowled.  
One of them stared ahead.  
One of them smiled.  
“We’ve come to meet you daughter,” the smiling one said. Finn, god of war. Clarke met him shortly after her birth, and remembered his quick smile and slow blanketing anger.  
“By order of Jaha,” the scowling one said. She had never met him before. His hair was slicked back and his eyes darted around the forest like he was looking for an escape.  
He had a smell to him she couldn’t exactly place. Like a mortal, but not quite.  
The silent one continued to stare ahead, face apathetic. Murphy, god of mischief. She hadn’t met him yet, but knew enough to be wary.  
But the conjuring of Jaha’s name changed the landscape of the conversation. They knew it, she knew it. Most importantly her mother knew it.  
“You’d better come in for tea and offerings then,” Abby said, already turned around and walking to the house.  
They nodded and followed them to their cabin. 

Clarke watched them and was watched in return.  
“We’ve met before, do you remember?” Finn asked, voice kind dispite the tension.  
“I do,”  
He waited for her to say more. She didn’t.  
“You reek of new god,” her mother said to the scowling one.  
“I am,” he said.  
“Bellamy was born of a mortal,” Finn supplied. Bellamy looked away. “Kane fell in love with his mother and sew him and his sister in his thigh. When they were born they were gods,”  
Bellamy says nothing.  
Clarke understands the smell now.  
“She was a Lexan,” Bellamy finally volunteered. “My mother. I understand they worship you above all gods there,” he stopped paused and looked up, spoke to the ceiling. “Besides Jaha of course,”  
“Of course,” her and her mother repeated in unison.  
She thought about mentioning Lexa.  
Then thought better of it.  
“It’s a special place for me,”  
Bellamy nodded, and the conversation blessedly moved on to another topic.  
Finn mainly talked as everyone else stared on with vacant eyes lost in their own heads.  
The thing they never tell you about being immortal is that you run out of conversation topics within the first 500 years.  
Even the young god seemed to exist well beyond the table in her kitchen covered in tea and burnt mortal food.  
Clarke hated him for it. Hated that he was so young yet already so above them all. With his cold eyes and scowling lips. With his eyebrows pulled together so that a little indented line appeared between them.  
She hated him. 

“Mother?” Clarke asked, still sitting at the table after the three gods left.  
Abby ignored her, and continued to wipe out the tea cups with a damp cloth.  
Clarke sighed. Picked up the rest of the cups and brought them to her mother.  
She turned, but her mother grabbed her forearm.  
“Be careful about who you choose,” Abby warned. She had shaken the sleepy angry morning that had rested on her face for over a thousand years. She was fierce and harsh like a striking whip.  
“Mother?” Clarke asked.  
But Abby shook her head and turned back to the cups, letting Clarke go. 

“We have to go?” Clarke asked, her hands jumped down, smoothing out the skirt of her tunic.  
Her mother didnt answer, just stepped into nothingness. Clarke was expected to follow.  
So she did.  
On the otherside of nothing, everything was laid out before her.  
White spires so tall she could not see the tops. Stairs so tall and wide and grand they took up the entirety of her vision. Servants dressed in liquid gold, carrying trays of ambrosia and nector. Gods and godesses stood in circles, cruel smiles plastered on each and every face. She stood next to her mother, looking to see the same smile pulling at the edge of Abby’s lips.  
After all this time, Abby is still one of them.  
She followed her mother up the stairs, throwing her back into the same ramrod straight her mother stands. 

The bride smelt like a new god, the same smell that wafted off of her brother, stood at her side.  
The Groom smelt even newer, like blood becoming more, like when her father wrought iron into steel in his forge.  
“Her brother turned him into a god because she loved the mortal so much,” the smiling god of war told her. They stood as Bellamy handed over his sister to the god that was once mortal. Lincoln is his name, and he smiled at his bride like she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, even though he couldnt see her through her veil.  
“No one is happy of course, this is exactly what Jaha said would happen. We start turning mortals into gods, they will want their families to be gods, and their children to be gods. Soon they will outnumber us,” Finn continued on. “Bellamy was stripped of his title as sun god for his offense. He will serve in Kane’s place as ruler of the underworld,”  
Clarke tuned him out.  
Lincoln’s hand brushed under Octavia’s veil pulling it up and over her face.  
Clarke gasped along with the rest of the crowd as they see the young goddess’s face.  
It was covered in war paint.  
The same war paint Lexa had striped on her face before leaving for battle.  
“She’s bold,” Finn said, sounding mildly impressed.  
“She’s an imbecile,” Abby hissed.  
Clarke saw the paint like everyone else did: a declaration of what side Octavia was on.  
“She’s brave,” Clarke couldn’t help but whisper. 

It was a somber wedding, but it was also the only wedding Clarke had been to.  
Bellamy stood off to to side, not taking his eyes off his sister, like she was going to flutter away.  
Octavia would catch Clarke’s eyes every once in a while, knowing and pleading.  
Clarke did nothing.  
What could she do?  
“Say goodbye to your sister Bellamy,” Jaha orders laughing, drunk on ambrosia and the misfortune of others. “This will be the last time you see her,”  
Bellamy nods, and Octavia runs to him, throwing her arms around him in an embrace. It lasts a long time, and when they pull away both have wet eyes and deep frowns.  
Lincoln went to them, clasping Bellamy’s forearm when it’s offered and he nodded at whatever Bellamy whispered.  
“It’s sad isn’t it?” Finn asked coming to close. “This must be hard for you to watch, after what happened to your dad,”  
Clarke opened her mouth, intending to ask if he knew anything about what happened to Jake. But staring at Finn’s smiling face with Jaha in earshot she shut her mouth.  
But she can’t forget. 

It’s a weed she had thought she rooted out, thinking about her father. Wondering how he died. Wondering how you kill a god.  
She leaves the wedding quickly, escaping Octavia’s accusatory gaze. She went back to the cabin that once held her and her mother and her father, but that now only holds two beings, half immortal and half rot. 

She slowly imploded for half a century.  
She opened her mouth to ask her mother about him twenty times.  
No sound ever left her lips.  
In her head she rehearsed the conversation over and over.  
Sometimes the mother that only exists in her head says “oh, I’ve been waiting for you to ask again,” and she kindly explains it was all a horrible joke, and her father is back in his forge.  
And sometimes her mother slaps her again and forces her out of the house for daring to ask.  
But most of the times her mother that only exists in her head tells her to keep her mouth shut. 

It’s an ordinary day when Clarke finally broke.  
Her mother walked into the forge where Clarke was sitting and thinking for a month.  
Surprise slipped past Abby’s normally impassive expression as she saw Clarke in the chair were Jake used to sit, sketching out new designs and inventions.  
“You look-“ slipped past Abby’s lips before.  
“Mother?” Clarke asked.  
“You look just like Jake,” Abby admitted. She walked in and sat on the bench opposite of Clarke. For a second Clarke saw her old mother in front of her, from well over a millennium ago. Her expression was open and loving and everything Clarke thought her mother had lost.  
“What happened to him?” Clarke asked in a rush. It was then or never, and Clarke was so tired of never.  
“I told you before to never mention him,” Abby said, looking up to the sky as she stands quickly.  
“Why do you do that?” Clarke asked. “Are you that afraid of Jaha?”  
“Yes,” Abby admitted. “And you should be too,”  
“I need to know. I can’t live in fear anymore. I need you to tell me what happened,” Clarke demanded as she stood up too. “How do you kill a god? What did he do to be punished that badly?”  
“Enough, Clarke,” Abby cut across her. “I can’t lose you too,”  
“I can’t stay here. Not if you won’t give me answers,”  
Clarke stands up, walks away, fast as only gods can be.  
“Clarke, wait!” Abby cried.  
But Clarke couldn’t wait not anymore. She was faster then her mother, so she used it to her advantage, not stopping until she was out of her mothers lands. 

Where would a god go after he died?  
Where do the mortals go after they die?  
She trained her feet ahead, and stepped one after another, after another.  
When, a week later, her hands hit warm stone and she took a deep breath before walking into the cave.  
She stepped into the underworld, and immediately was hit with the smell of loss and desperation.  
It didn’t matter. She was in the one place she thought she could find answers.


	2. Part II: Fall

Clarke turned away from the dark of the cave, looking out at the outside mortal world. It was a gloomy day, cooler than normal, the sky clouded over, but no rain came.   
“What are you doing here?” A deep voice asked from behind her.   
She held herself still.   
Breathing deep for a long minute.   
Then turned around. Looked at the young god before her.   
The difference in temperature was shocking.   
The air in the cave tasted of heat and desperation.   
“I’m looking for something,” Clarke finally said.   
He looked half wild, so different from the slicked back young god she first met, or even the put together, sad, god she saw at his sisters wedding half a century ago.  
His hair was a curly mess, face was unshaven.   
But his eyes were calm, looking at her with a steadiness that wasn’t to be ignored.   
“Whatever you are looking for, whoever you are looking for,” Bellamy said, full of knowing. “You won’t find them down here,”   
“You don’t know that,” Clarke argued, stepping even farther into the cave.   
“You should leave,” Bellamy said. The words came out strained, like the cost of saying them was heavy.   
“This is where I need to be,”   
“This isn’t a place you get to come and go. If you come in, there will be a price to leave,” he warned, eyes still fierce.   
“I’ll pay whatever price I need,” Clarke told him.   
Bellamy assessed. Then he stood aside.   
She stepped in even further.   
He followed. 

The cave was warm and wet with humid condensation.   
She walked ahead, fingers skimmed the surprisingly smooth passage. She was flushed from the damp heat. It was so pervasive it seemed to drip.   
He cleared his throat, a thick sound that echoed around them.   
She turned back to him and his sudden smile was as slick as the walls that surrounded them.   
“If you’re here, you might as well get the tour,” his charm was sudden and blanketing. Clarke had no idea where it came from or why it was being thrown at her.   
Clarke nodded, not trusting her voice.   
Not trusting his sudden charm, not trusting this place.   
But she let him step beside her and give her the lay of the land. 

There’s less screaming than she imagined. Less mortal anguish and pleads for another chance. The human souls that they passed didn’t look miserable.   
They mostly looked bored.   
When gods talked about the underworld it was in low tones with words of terror and dismay on their lips.   
And while Clarke hadn’t seen a lot of the underworld, she’d seen enough to be surprised.   
“It’s so...” Clarke trailed off.   
“Quiet,” Bellamy answered, the smile was still planted on, but his eyes had gone sharp. Clarke liked him better this way.   
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Quiet”   
“These are just your average people,” Bellamy explained. “Who lived an average life. So they get an average death,”   
“And the ones that lived exceptional lives?” Clarke couldn’t help but ask. She thinks for the first time in a long time about the woman she’s long thought of as her mortal. Green eyes and streaky face paint used to be always on her mind. But she hasn’t thought about Lexa in a long time.   
“You must have loved her a lot,” Clarke’s head whips over to look at him. Bellamy’s voice was gentle and kind, and his face trained into sympathy. Clarke didn’t trust a single bit of him.   
Clarke said nothing. Bellamy’s face stayed the same, looking at her with a small pout and a worry mark between his eyebrows. But his eyes narrowed, just the slightest.   
Clarke looked at him, waited for him to break.   
After a minute he finally did, and looked ahead.   
“Come further in, I’ll show you the souls that lived good lives,”   
She followed, but kept her eyes carefully trained on him. 

He didn’t show her where Lexa must’ve been, and she found no traces of her father anywhere.   
Instead he lead her through the good and the great and the bad and the evil.   
She looked best she could, but he never lingered anywhere long enough for her to look her fill.   
He watched her face the whole way through. And she watched him right back. 

 

The bridge to he stayed was thin and perilous, but Bellamy walked ahead with such confidence that Clarke can’t help but follow. The River Styx shimmered underneath. If she stared at it long enough she could see the shape of men and women floating by in its depth.   
“Coming?” Bellamy asked once he was farther ahead then her.   
She nodded, and tore her eyes away from the waters before she saw a mortal she knew in its depths.   
He led her where he lived and slept in the underworld, a manor carved into the walls of the cave, the stone looking stained with red mortal blood, time-rusted and human-warm.   
It was beautiful, open windows and intricate carvings. She walked forward until her hand brushed against the skulls carved into the doorframe.   
She was old, and she knew what old felt like. But this carving, this place. It was as old as the universe itself, and she almost choked on the dust of the universe.   
“It’s beautiful,” she couldn’t help but say.   
Bellamy nodded, looking back at it, his eyes taking it in like it was new to him.   
“I suppose it is,” he answered as he stepped inside. He lead her to a living space with sofas sprawled out with book cases lining the walls. Clarke once again let her outstretched hand brush against the ancient place.   
It was still balmy but it wasn’t stifling the way it was in some of the lower chambers of the caves. She needed to go and search for any traces of her father, but she wasn’t quite ready to leave the comfort of being in a home after walking for so long.   
“Can I get you anything to eat?” He asked. She turned, saw him nodding to a fruit bowl and bread plate.   
She was hungry, but she shook her head.   
“I’m not staying,” she answered.   
“You sure? I could get you something more substantial,”   
“No, I’m fine, thank you ” she said. She couldn’t dally. She was already getting too comfortable.   
“It’s really no problem. It’ll be quick,”   
There was something in his tone Clarke didn’t trust.   
She narrows her eyes at him.   
“If I’m to stay, you should show me my quarters and allow me to settle in,” Clarke hinted. She really just wanted to be alone for a minute to think. And to get away from his dark stare.   
“Sure,” he nodded his head. But she could tell he was holding his tongue.   
He led her up a grand sprawling staircase carved into the red rock past several empty floors until they reached what seemed to be the top floor. His steps where light as he showed her to a front room with a big four poster bed draped in flowy red fabric, a shade darker than the walls. An open window let air in and out. She went to look through it and saw that she could almost see the whole of the underworld from it.   
“Thank you,” she said to Bellamy.   
He nodded before he turned to leave.   
He hesitated, then looked back. He wasn’t particularly tall or wide, but his frame took up most of the doorway. The curve of his shoulders brushed the frame, and hint at a muscular shoulders under the linen of his shirt.   
He was beautiful, with his dark hair mopping his eyes and his lips twisted up into something not quite a smile.   
She would’ve loved to sketch him, bring out the charcoal she left in her mother’s house and put him to paper, even as she knew she couldn’t do him justice.   
But that was not a relevant thought, so she pushed it out of her mind.   
“Bellamy?” She asked.   
The cocky smile he’d been wearing all day returned and every part of her hated it.   
“When you get settled in, come find me,” he ordered. “We can talk about what I can do for you then,”   
His tone held a flirtatious demand.   
Clarke pretended it was something she could stomach before she nodded.  
He gave one last unbearable smile before turning away. 

She hurdled herself out the window the second his shadow was out of her sight.   
Down a five story drop, that would probably kill a mortal.   
But she’s a god. And it takes more then a steep fall to kill a god.   
How do you kill a god?   
How could her dad be dead?   
She started on the bridge, intending to find out. 

She started at the place it would be unbearable for her to find him: in the fires of eternal damnation.   
It was a long descent, the walls going from warm to hot to burning. With each step she felt like she couldn’t breath.   
She felt eyes on her, but she didn’t catch where they were coming from. All around her were souls to lost in their own torment to spare her more than a glance. She passed through most without any acknowledgement.   
A low moan filled the air getting louder with each step, but still. She did not see her father’s mop of blonde hair.   
She forced away self doubt. It had been a long time since she’d last seen him. Could she even recognize him?  
But he’s her father. Of course she could.   
The moans turn into screams and still she walked.   
Her skin started to blister with the sheer heat radiating off the walls.   
But she’s a god. She could take it.   
Still she walked. 

He found her when the screams became a piercing crescendo and the blisters were constant. Her skin wasn’t healing itself fast enough, so every part of her screamed as she walked. Her long tunic smoked wildly about her, and she knew it won’t be long until they caught fire.   
She’d never felt that kind of pain. She saw him in front of her, and she tried to step around him.   
“What are you doing down here?” His question was a demand.   
Bellamy’s skin was blisterless, his face wasn’t even flushed. She felt heat at bottom of her tunic, and when she looked she saw the edge of it curling in on itself as it blazed in a small fire. When she looked up she saw his gaze on it.   
“Move,” is all she said, once again trying to step around him. He just followed.   
“It’s hurting you,” he pointed out, nodding to the fire crawling up her clothes, sounding shocked as she once again tried to walk around him.  
“Clarke, stop,” he said, grabbing her arm. His hand was cool and she forced herself not to lean into it.   
“You need to stop,”   
“It’s not hurting you,” Clarke said, shaking herself out of his grasp.   
“I’m the master of this land. And you are not,”   
“I can handle it,”  
There wasn’t a piece of fabric on her that wasn’t up in flames. She burned but she didn’t flinch. She stepped ahead, and he continued to trail her.   
“Whatever you are looking for you are not going to find it here,” he said.   
She whipped around to look at him.   
“How do you know I’m looking for something?”   
“You wouldn’t come down here if you aren’t looking for something,” Bellamy said, too confident.  
“You shouldn’t be so sure,” Clarke said, as she continued her march forward.   
“Come on, I’ll set us up some food, we can work together,” he sounded kind and real and worried. She didn’t trust a second of it. She was more naked than not, the remains of her tunic charcoal at her feet.   
“You can’t stop me,” she said. There was a quiet, an absence of his footsteps.   
“I can do whatever I want. This is my realm,”   
His voice was back to prickly. She turned, give him one last look. He looked back. She was naked, but refusing to show any hesitation. She wasn’t a pretty thing just then, her skin peeling off, muscle and bone and reeking of cooked flesh. But he didn’t look away.   
“If you could have stopped me, you would’ve already,”   
She walked forward, the bare soles of her feet striking burning rock.   
He didn’t try to stop her again.

She turns over the rest place of the eternal damned.   
It takes seven days. Seven burning days. Her skin started melting at one point, but she didn’t stop. She had never known what it was like to feel skin slipping off her bones. To feel her feet literally cook, smelling of the burnt meat offerings the human gave.   
But she did not die.   
She kept going until she searched every   
speck of dust for clues.   
She found nothing.   
She forced herself to stay on her feet, walking forward until the air was cool and the howls turned to moans. And she was broken, shattered pieces all hurdling towards her one goal: find her father.   
She tripped over a pile of clothes on her way up. She stopped and picked them up. A dress, soft and beautiful, just her size. She doesn’t think before she puts it on. 

When she trudged back up to Bellamy’s manor, half crawling as her body healed her with ever step, she saw him, watching her as she entered the structure.   
There was something like respect in his eyes.   
She told herself it meant nothing.   
He didn’t say anything about the dress.   
She crashed upon the bed he provided and slept for three days straight.   
When she woke she felt no peace. 

He was in the downstairs front room eating when she answered down feeling restless and stuck.   
“Feeling better?” He asked.   
She did not answer.   
“Sit and eat,” he flashed a smile, but it was an order none the less. She said nothing, didn’t even look at him before heading out the front door.   
His voice floated behind her, but she paid it no mind.   
She had decided upon waking up, that if she could not find the one loved one in the afterlife, she would subside, for the time being, on another loved one. 

“Lexa” Clarke voice was a whispered surprise as it carried across the the field of tall green waving grass. She had found her in the land of heroes. There was a light breeze and the feeling of sunshine where ever she walked.   
Lexa looked up. She was beautiful, as beautiful dead as she was alive. Clarke forced out a breath as she walked towards her on almost steady legs.   
Her green eyes were round in shock, but she didn’t look upset to see Clarke, not how she had been the last time they were together.   
“Clarke,” Lexa’s voice whispered back.   
They ended up under a shady tree sitting on the grass, cross legged and looking at each other.   
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes were still wide and her lips pursed up. “It’s been so long,”  
She’s still so beautiful.   
“It’s been centuries,” Clarke told her. But her eyes were trained on her own hand, where her fingers where tangled in the grass, green shoots poking in between her fingers.   
It still hurt to look at Lexa. Even with the distance of centuries, there was still pain and confusion and loss.   
Clarke started to rip the grass from the earth in big chunks. She should leave, this isn’t why she’s here. There’s a reason she didn’t come here the second she stepped foot into this realm.   
“I haven’t stopped missing you,” Lexa tells her. Clarke’s head jolted up. But she took a deep breath and swallowed down her rage.   
“That’s not why I’m here,” Clarke said.   
“Oh?”   
“I’m looking for a god who supposedly died,” an eyebrow of Lexa’s picked up. Clarke continued “you’ve been here longer than I have. Have you seen him? Or even heard anything about him,”   
“But god’s can’t die,” Lexa argued.   
“This one did. And I can’t think of anywhere else he’d be,”   
“I’m sorry Clarke, but I haven’t heard of any gods down here besides Bellamy and Kane, who was here before him,” Lexa answered, actually looking a little sorry.   
Clarke nodded and stood.   
Turning to leave, she hesitated.   
“What do you think of him?” Clarke asked, hating the question, but needing to know.   
“Who?” Lexa asked. “Bellamy?”   
Clarke just nodded.   
“He’s fair. More fair than Kane was. But he seems a lot sadder than Kane ever did. More alone,” Lexa shrugged.   
Clarke nodded and turned away.   
“Clarke,” Lexa called. Despite herself Clarke turned to look. “I’m here for you. Whenever you need it. Okay?”   
Clarke nodded again and turned away.   
She walked back to the manor, already needing more sleep. 

Bellamy was waiting for her at the table, book in hand, leg restless. He looked towards her when she walked through the entrance. They shared a gaze, both of them, she knew, were seeing but not understanding.   
She wasn’t sure she wanted to understand him.   
After a minute he shook his head, laid the book page down holding his spot on the table then stood up.   
“I can walk you out,” he offered, voice kinder then she’d ever heard it. Sadder then she’d ever heard it.   
“Out?” She questioned.   
“You found what you were looking for. I wouldn’t want to keep you,” something bitter had crawled into his throat and his whole face scowled with it.   
“I didn’t find what I was looking for?” Clarke turned the statement into a question.   
Bellamy cocked his head.   
“But Lexa?”   
“Lexa? Oh no, she’s not-“ Clarke cut herself off to look at him.   
The corners of his mouth turned down, but she preferred this version of him more than the oily smile he had plastered on a week ago.   
“Then why are you down here?” His expression was open and honest. And so she rewarded him with honesty of her own.   
“I’m looking for my dad,”   
“But your dad-“ he stops like he can’t bare to say it.   
“I know. He's dead. So I came here, thinking if he was anywhere he’d be here,”   
“But-“ he tried to force himself to start again, but again he fell flat.   
“He’s a god. I know. And I don’t know how you’d kill a god. But I intend to find out,”   
Bellamy stared at her, eyes still wide with confusion. But then something sure stole over his face.   
“Okay. I’ll help you look,”   
“You don’t have to,” Clarke shook her head.   
“I want to,” Bellamy said. “We’ll start tomorrow,”   
Clarke thought about arguing to start then. But she was tired and she wanted to be alone.   
She looked out at the setting red sun of the underworld. She didn’t know how a cave, even a cave as big as the underworld, could have a sun.   
But then again, there’s so much that she didn’t know, as she was coming to find out.   
His face is shadowed with red when she looked to him, open and serious. He looked back at her and something passed between them.   
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.

He was eating a pomegranate as she headed down to meet him. His lips stained red with the juice.   
She wondered what it’d taste like on him.   
“Come on,” she said, already out the door.   
“Clarke wait, eat, sit, take a second,” He held out the other half of the pomegranate for her. She shook her head.   
“I’m going to start in the midlands. You can meet me there when you are done,” she said before heading out.   
She heard a frustrated grunt, but he didn’t stop her as she head out. 

“Come on, it’s getting dark,” Bellamy said, straightening out from a crouch where he was looking in a sinkhole.   
“You go ahead,” Clarke said, hand outstretched to wave him off. But he took it and pulled her closer to him.   
“Clarke. I’m happy to help you look. But you can’t fall apart like that again. It was hard to watch. You need to take care of yourself,”   
“I’m fine,” Clarke said. But she didn’t pull away.   
“How will your dad feel when you finally find him, but you’re shattered,”   
Clarke glared, and took a step back, shaking out of his grasp.   
“Okay,”   
He looked surprised by her agreement. But she was tired. And too close to feeling hopeless to keep going.   
“Come on, I’m not that bad,” Bellamy said as he walked her back. “I’ve got to be better then seven days in the fires of damnation,”   
She couldn’t help the curve of her lip.   
“A little,”   
He laughed at that. It’s the first time she heard him laugh, and it struck something in her.   
“Just a little?” He questioned.   
“Just a little,” she agreed. This time she laughed with him. It felt sweet as the sound bounced off the cave walls, and then came back to her a scary, tangible thing.   
She pulled away and headed straight inside, shaking her head at his offer of supper. 

They woke up the next morning and did it again. And then the morning after that, until a week past, until a month passed.   
She was hungry, but the hunger became a constant she refused to give up.   
Down there she had so few constants, she didn’t want to let it slip past her.   
Red. Hunger. Bellamy.   
Day in and day out.   
Bellamy. Hunger. Red.   
But one day passed with shared smiles and overlapping laughter and overlapping hands, only to be followed with a day filled with even more understanding and kindness and gentle touches.   
She should hate it.   
And a part of her succeeds in anger and a sad sort of wrath at the emotion he’s striking in her.   
But most of her leans into it.   
And when he leaned back, and they shared each other’s weight she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to carry it all on her own again.   
But still. She tried her best to cling to hunger and red and Bellamy. 

“It’s beautiful.” Her voice was an awed whisper she didn’t try to stifle. He still heard her over the sound of rushing water. He didn’t take his eyes off her.   
Water pounded off the cliff, bluer then she thought possible as it raced down to the somehow placid lake underneath. The red walls mixed with the reflection of blue water, casting everything into a lavender.   
He looked beautiful, purple and black, eyes watchful and full.   
“I’ve been saving this spot,” he told her, so open she’s tempted to crawl inside his tone and live there. “It’s where I go think. They can’t come in,”   
He gestured out to souls of the mortals. He had taken her through a small cave where the crouched through until they had gotten to the underground lake.   
“I’ve been here a lot, and I never saw him. But I knew you’d want to check,”   
“Thank you,” she said, meaning it more then she had ever meant those words in the past.   
She knew what it took for him to let her in.   
“Thank you,” she repeated.   
He nodded.   
She raised a hand up, brushing his cheek before she pulled away.   
She started looking, knowing he was stuck still and immobile behind her.   
She kept on. 

Their walk back was quiet.   
They pass through the small cavern to the midlands where those who lived an average life now exist in their average afterlife.   
Somethings changed between them, Clarke can feel it in the space that lives between them, sticky and warm.   
It was something to swallow whole, or be choked on. And Clarke wasn’t sure which would hurt more.   
Bellamy stopped at a standstill, and Clarke nearly plowed into his back.   
She side stepped him, and saw what he saw.   
There a boy writhed on the floor. Young and skin and bones; he looked small and starved. He looked more real then any soul in this place that Clarke had ever seen.   
She ran forward.   
And just before she could touch him, he faded out, like he had never been there at all.   
“What?” Clarke started looking towards Bellamy.   
“He’s in between worlds,” he explained looking half broken by it. “He’s dying, but fighting it,”   
“Is he going to-“ she stopped, not sure what she was asking.   
“Death always wins,” Bellamy said, voice full of mourning.   
And suddenly the boy reappeared, moaning and writhing in his death.   
“Can’t you do something?”   
“I’ve never- I don’t know” he answered, halting on every word.   
Clarke reached for the boy, and found she could touch him. The boys eyes went wild like he could feel her too.   
“Shh,” Clarke said, at a loss. “Hush, it’s going to be okay. You are going to be okay,”   
She looked up at Bellamy, but he looked just as lost.   
Clarke started singing.  
She wasn’t sure why she was doing it but the song her mother sang to her as a baby fell from her lips and she didn’t force them back.   
It echoed in the cavern, and everything stopped to watch.   
She kept singing as the boy kept struggling, holding him through his last gasping breath.   
With it he lost his substance, and he fell through Clarke’s arms, sinking into the red, red earth.   
Then Clarke was crying.   
Sobbing.   
For the boy, for all mortals, for her father, for her mother, for herself.   
She cried for over a thousand years of unshed tears, stuttering and drowning in them.   
She sat on her knees looking away from Bellamy. And just when she was greateful for him not being able to see her, he felt his arms circle around her.   
And she cried harder for being held.   
And it was a long time before she got up. 

That night she didn’t head up straight to her room the way she had in nights past.   
She sat with him watching as he ate, silent and empty.   
It’s not until he gets up to grab fruit from the bowl near the window that she finds her voice. It was easier to ask his back, somehow.   
“Was that the first time you had ever seen that?” She asked.   
He waited until he was seated to answer her question, a knife and pomegranate in front of him.   
“No,” he shook his head. “It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen,”   
She nodded.   
She reached for the knife, and he let her. She touches the tip to her finger.   
She pulls it away and sticks it into the wooden table, deep enough so that it stands up straight in the table.   
“I’m so tired Bellamy,” her voice cracked and it felt like the rest of her cracked with it.   
She was tired. Tired of being tired, tired of being confused and lost. Tired of being hungry. Tired of red.   
He was just about the only thing she wasn’t tired of.   
His hand came to rest in hers.   
He said nothing, but he didn’t have to.   
She let out the longest breath she’s ever let slip past her lips.   
Then with the hand not blanketed by his, she reached for a handful pomegranates seed that were spilled out on the table.   
She felt his eyes on hers as she lifted them to her lips.   
Then he moved so fast, jolting across the table, she was forced to remember that he, too is a god.   
His hand slapped the red jewels out of her hand scattering them across the red stone floor.   
“Bellamy!” she said, stunned and staring at him where he landed sprawled with is torso on the table.   
Bellamy sprung up, moving like only a young god can, all power and speed, lacking precision.   
He paced the floor, his steps bearing a staccato to the stone beneath his feet.   
“Bellamy?” Now her voice was a question.   
“Clarke,” And his voice was a pained beaten thing between them.   
She got up, a hand halting his movement.   
“You can’t eat,” he said, finally daring to look at her. “If you eat anything you’ll be trapped down here,”   
“But why?” She stops remembering the daily routine of him offering her food, and her soft dismissal. She never did, she wanted to punish herself- she knew it even as she was doing it. “Why did you try to get me to eat so many times?”  
Bellamy collapses into the bench, his head in his hands.   
“Bellamy?” Her voice is now an angry demanding thing. She doesn’t understand.   
“Bellamy!”   
His silence was in many ways worse than an answer would’ve been. It sat surrounding them until Clarke couldn’t take it.   
She turns to leave.   
“I was looking at an eternity alone,” Bellamy croaked, stopping her in her tracks. “It was going to be me. In this big house in this big cave, me and all the dead,”   
Clarke turned to look at him, and saw haunted eyes.   
“But then you came. Blazing and beautiful. Smart and stubborn. You weren't going to stay, you made that clear. But it was more then I’d ever thought I’d get. It was enough to make me think you might stay,”   
“Stay against my will!”   
“I know, I know. But when you left for the eternally damned, you were burning, on literal fire in front of me Clarke. And I had never seen anything more beautiful. And even when I didn’t understand, I didn’t want you to leave,” his voice went soft, wobbly “I still don’t,”   
“It needs to be my choice!” Clarke shouted, loud after his quiet.   
“I know,” his head hung once more, and more than anything else, that hurt something primal in her. Bellamy shouldn’t ever look like that. He’s a proud god. He was a proud man. To see him in shame wrenched something in her.   
She couldn’t. So she didn’t and she stormed out. 

She got to the base of the bridge before she turned around.   
She saw him through the big windows, head back in his hands.   
“But you stopped me,” the words fell out of her mouth before she could fully think them. She was back at his feet.  
He looked up.   
“It’s your choice,” he said it simply. It was enough.   
She nodded, walking towards the bench until she swung a leg around it, straddling it next to he sat up straight, and she could breath again.   
“Thank you,” she said.   
“But,”   
“You stopped me,” she said it like it was enough. And it was.   
Something broke between them, both of them leaned forward, her hand on his jaw, his hand on the top of her thigh.   
When their lips met it was sweet and knowing.   
And she was shocked by how much she knew him.   
There was more understanding with him then there had ever been with anyone else.   
She brought a hand to the back of his neck. His hand moved to her waist and she half let herself be pulled, half crawled onto his lap.   
With his hands on her back, in her hair, and hers on his jaw and chest, they built something. Without words or logic. Just two bodies moving together, instinctually with the goal of hearing the other gasp.   
And she wasn’t alone. For the first time in so long she wasn’t alone.   
His hand caressed down to where she was warm and wet for him. She ground into him where he was hard for her.   
“Upstairs,” she gasped into his mouth. He nodded helping her stand. They ran up the stairs, with inhuman speed and their hands clasped. They ended up in her room, where she pushed him onto the bed and crawled on top of him.   
She would’ve felt self conscious of her desperation if she hadn’t felt his, equal and heavy, as he lifted up her dress.   
Once it was over her head he flipped them, so that her back was flat on the bed. And he just looked at her, eyes filled with awe for her.   
She had never been with a god before. Just Lexa, and a few other mortals. To be the sole focus of one, to be Bellamy’s sole focus made her full and hungry at the same time. He lifted himself off the bed, lifting his tunic over his head.   
He looked down at here where she was bare before him. And she looked up at him where he stood, bare for her.   
“Clarke,” her name fell from her lips and she felt caressed by it.   
“Are you sure?” He asked.   
“Yes, Bellamy,” she answered, and then she did again, because she like the way it sounded the first time. “Yes.”  
And then he was back on top of her, kissing her, blanketing her.   
His fingers inside of her, his mouth on her neck.   
She wanted him so bad.   
She twisted her body so she was straddling him.   
He was flushed against the red sheets, beautiful and everything.   
She lifted herself over him, eyes locked as she lowered herself down.   
And then, more then any other time she was surrounded by him.   
Red. Hunger. Bellamy.   
He was all the way in, filling her. She lifted herself back up only to sink back down in a way that had them both moaning.   
It was perfect but it still wasn’t enough. Her hand twisted in the red sheets.   
Red. Hunger. Bellamy.   
It was all she wanted to know.   
She moved faster, both of them panting.   
He whispered her name one more time, and she leaned forward to kiss him. His hands clung to her waist.   
She’d never felt so full in her life.   
“Clarke, I’m close,” he warned  
She moved a hand down to where she was aching only for him to push it aside so that he could rub little circles that had her close to sobbing.   
“Bellamy,” she whimpered.  
Her eyes rolled in the back of her head while she trembled on top of him, lost in how full she is, in how good he feels.   
He followed her over and they fell together.   
When she caught her breath she looked at him still framed in red.   
A hand reached out and caressed her face.   
“Bellamy,” she whispered.   
And he understood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought, also check out my tumblr hundreddollarlarry.tumblr.com  
> Thanks again!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, please let me know how you feel!  
> I’m going to try to be posting every Thursday night. There are only 5 chapters and they are mostly drafted.  
> But comment and let me know what you think!


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